Open Access and Open Science in Argentina | Tensiones y oportunidades de los repositorios digitales abiertos

OCSDNet is participating in #OpenAccessWeek2015. In this blog, Mariano Fressoli and Valeria Azra write about Open Access digital repositories and the culture of Open Science in Argentina.

Mariano and Valeria are a part of an OCSDNet research project seeking to understand how practices of Openness can impact ‘alternative science’ agendas, and the potential implications for development.

Click here for the first blog in the series, whereby Assane Fall discusses his experience with Open Access as a young librarian in Senegal.

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Blog Summary:

Recognising the issues of closed-access publishing of scientific research, Argentina has created a law stating that all researchers must publish their work and data in publicly accessible digital repositories.

While digital repositories do come with their fair share of financial and logistical challenges, open access data and publications also offer important benefits for science, research and development.

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Open Access and Open Science in Argentina

It’s not uncommon to hear that scientific knowledge is “universal” and “beneficial to us all.” However, accessing this knowledge is often complicated, particularly in countries that are often on the periphery of knowledge production regimes. This is because the results of scientific research are published in journals or specialized books that cannot be found in the average library. Also, international scientific editorials and databases like Elsevier, Project Muse, JSTOR and others charge exorbitant amounts of money to manage journal collections. In Argentina, the government spends approximately 20 million dollars a year for national scientific institutions to have access to relevant publications. However, most people do not belong to these institutions and therefore simply cannot access the majority of scientific research produced both globally and locally.

The National Law for the Creation of Digital, Institutional and Open Access Repositories, enacted in Argentina in 2013, creates an opportunity to change this trend. It opens up the results of publicly funded scientific research not only to other scientists but also to citizens in general.

In short, repositories are digital libraries. Since the enactment of this law, scientists are obliged to file their scientific production in a digital repository no longer than six months following its publication. They must also file any data produced in publicly funded projects within a five-year period after publication

Despite the benefits they entail, the repositories face some obstacles from inside and outside the academic community.

Challenges of Digital Repositories

First of all, scientific assessment schemes worldwide promote publication in international journals whose access is normally restricted. In practice, this has favoured a few publishers who have consequently come to dominate the science and technology publication market. Profit margins for the publishing companies are significant: 40% for scientific journals and 16% for scientific books. Clearly, scientific publishers lobby to keep those margins as high as possible. Now, as Open Access becomes more and more popular, companies are simultaneously seeking ways to profit from open access publications.

At the same time, the closed-access publication culture is deeply embedded into the policy and practice of many scientific research institutions. When researchers plan their research projects and papers, they are often pressured to publish in the most prestigious journals. Indeed, where to publish a research output has become more important as a ranking tool than who actually reads the material. A cultural change within the scientific community is required to modify these practices. This must be supported and endorsed by new forms of evaluation.

Digital repositories are just one of many practices of the emerging open science movement. Openness is in tension with knowledge commercialization policies that have dominated the Science and Technology Policy agenda since the late eighties. In fact, digital repositories truly affect the day-to-day work of the liaison offices within universities and other public labs. These offices search for productive applications of scientific and technological knowledge developed in public institutions. When private firms are directly involved in the research process, they request exclusive rights on the use of the knowledge outputs. Similarly, when research outputs could be potentially commercialised, liaison offices are intent to protect that knowledge from open distribution in order to offer exclusive rights to private partners in the future.

Although Open Access Repositories Law contemplates exceptions for cases subject to confidentiality clauses, the truth is that open access by default, as enacted by the law, complicates matters further to liaison offices. A related concern expressed by this sector is the extent to which sufficient technological infrastructure exists to enable local actors to benefit from open access. The risk exists that foreign firms would be in the position to exploit locally produced knowledge much faster, driving local firms out through product market competition.

Benefits of Digital Repositories

There are other initiatives similar to the Argentinian law in Europe and Latin America (Peru, for example, just approved a similar law; Brazil is currently discussing the matter in Congress); therefore there are already several countries that recognize the important benefits that open repositories can facilitate.

Benefits are quite clear for scientific production. Open access avoids duplication and increases the common pool of data and resources that scientists could draw from in future research. Moreover, the information collected in public repository could be used as inputs to assess scientific performance.

Moreover, public repositories bring science closer to day-to-day problems. Anyone with Internet access can, for instance research scientific advances to treat diseases or get to know the latest gadgets that could change their lifestyles. By getting closer to society at large, open science practices could facilitate the development of new questions, which, in turn, could create new research enquiries that drives scientific production closer to the community’s demands.

The new Open Access Repositories Laws in Argentina and other countries of the region is an opportunity to embrace the benefits of Open Science. To be sure, tensions and maybe some resistance will follow. However, sooner or later, the advantages of sharing and the easiness of doing so using online tools will push for policy promotion of open science